Writing a book series no one asked for may be one of the most massive creative commitments on Earth. And that’s especially true for indie authors. 

Collaborative art projects—film, television, theatre, etc.—strike me as equally bonkers in terms of their ambition. You get a lot of competing ideas about the final product. Sometimes the piece you worked on ends up on the cutting room floor. 

But writing is, by and large, done by solo creatives.  

And in the modern publishing space, books are increasingly published by sole creators, too.  

I started thinking about Anna Lin, Dave Montcalm, Jason Lin, the skyworms, and a bunch of characters you still haven’t met in Spring 2014.

This April, they’ll have been with me for a full decade of my life. 

It’s a long time to think about the same characters and their problems. 

For this reason, I have great sympathy for George R. R. Martin. He’s been thinking about Game of Thrones, Jon Snow, Daenerys Targaryen, and all the rest since, oh, 1988. And probably longer. 

Because no matter how much I, as an admirer of Martin’s, want those last books to be done (especially after how the series ended, gah), I know he wants to be finished even more. 

Consider how tired he must be after more than 35 years on the same project. Thinking about my own work sometimes makes me want to take to my bed, and it’s only been a decade. 

Getting a fantasy series off of the ground is a heavy lift.

Here’s what I’ve learned so far.

Surprise! That first draft was a whole series 

In 2015, I finished the first draft of Chaos Calling. Little did I know, I’d written a whole series.

In the plot maps and journals from when I wrote the second draft of what became Chaos Calling and will one day be Chaos Armor, it’s clear that I thought I had a trilogy.

Roughly from 2016 to 2019, the story existed as one book–which seems like utter madness now! Past me estimated that I would be done, with all three books published, by 2025. Maybe 2026 at the latest. 

Great, I wrote back then, with zero awareness of my naivety. I’ll be in my 40s. Young enough to still travel easily and meet readers while taking the victory lap that may come from having a completed series. 

Well friends, it’s January 3, 2024. I’m in my 40s. Only one of my books—in what is most likely a five-book series—is out. 

On December 31, 2023, I finished Book II’s fourth draft.

In part, I’m posting to celebrate its existence for the first time as a fully-fleshed out, self-contained book. The manuscript now enters what I anticipate will be an 18-month production phase. That assumes its timeline will follow a similar path to what I experienced for Chaos Calling. I won’t really know until I finish. 

As I fix page numbers, I keep thinking back to that past self as she stands in the subway doors, furiously writing on her phone. And I think of her with so much love.

Because if she’d known the scope and magnitude of what she was tackling, she may have given up.

Writing a book series is not for the faint of heart.

Writing a Book Series in 2024

On average, self-published books sell 200 copies through the author’s personal network. 

Some of the most stunning data to come out of that wild Penguin vs Simon & Schuster lawsuit? Many traditionally published books also only sell a handful of copies.

We’re talking less than 12. 

I can proudly say that I beat both scales handily in my first year, and continued to challenge my sales numbers in Chaos Calling’s second year. If I’d based my success on those metrics, I may have viewed my project with more wisdom. I would definitely have saved myself a lot of grief. 

But I’m ambitious. It’s my nature. I wanted to sell 5,000 copies in one year and, long-term, a million copies of my series. 

I still do. And it hurts that there is no shortcut to that outcome.

I may never achieve that depth of readership. Or it may happen after I’m dead. After all, I wouldn’t be the first author that’s happened to.

Since starting this project, I’ve thought a lot about Jane Austen. She had no idea what her work would become when she died. She never saw a word of the critical success or a dime of the massive fortune her books continue to earn. 

That woman’s pen produced a billion-dollar, critically-acclaimed literary empire.

And when you consider how much the fear of poverty and homelessness runs like a wound through her books and letters . . . well, friends, that breaks my fucking heart. 

Calling a truce with my ego 

I chart the novel I’m working on using this wall.
As you can see, it’s beautifully blank right now.

When I started, writing a book series was never my goal. Yet, it’s where I landed.

Sometimes I want to write other books.  Sometimes it feels like The Xenthian Cycle will never be done.

Yet I remember looking at my Book II sticky wall in January 2023. Only four out of eight purple stickies for Jason’s chapters had checkmarks. Checking off every chapter in the book felt impossible. 

In total, I wrote over 107,0000 words this year. And Chaos Armor’s current draft is complete.

While I congratulate myself on achieving that goal, I am also working to accept that my books’ fate is entirely out of my hands. That’s a truth you’ll hear authors acknowledge, but there’s extra mind-fuckery involved when you’re also the publisher and marketing team. 

In my bones, I believe in The Xenthian Cycle. That belief keeps me coming back to write and market this story.

I’ll deliver it to the best of my ability. And only a small readership may ever care. 

I have to be okay with that, and make the art I make. 

~

Perhaps you’re reading this post on an idle Thursday. Maybe you’re writing a book series, too, or feeling the creative weight of your other dreams.

If you are, I feel for you. I have been in the dark place before, and I will be there again. We all get knocked down.

So get up with me, and let’s take the next step. I know that we can do it.

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The first signal from the Velvet Ditch is subtle.

As usual, I misread it.

Gradually, I notice my morning writing is bogged down in tedium. I’m not progressing at my usual pace. Checklist items remain unchecked. The growing list fills me with dread instead of excitement.

After a few weeks, opening my current file each morning requires an immense act of willpower—and I’ve structured my life to create that gift of time.

So, why am I squandering it?

To be clear, the pattern I’m describing isn’t depression or physical exhaustion. I’ve experienced both and would seek clinical attention should they recur.

How can I be sure?

For starters, my depression usually comes with a walloping dose of persistent pessimism where any positive feelings flatline. That isn’t happening. Work with clients is proceeding. I’m meeting my deadlines on that front.

Physically, I’m fortunate to also feel fine: I have no body pain, fatigue, or atypical reluctance to get out of bed. I sleep well. My commitments at home, with my family, and with friends are being met. When I fulfill these obligations, I feel joy.

But there’s a definite spark missing.

Concurrent signals:

• Reading way less than I normally do and watching minimal movies or television.
• Developing a sudden, voracious appetite for immersive video games.
• Wanting to be outside, preferably in water (I love to swim).

“What is happening?” becomes the undercurrent in conversations with peers and mentors.

Gradually, I realize that my creativity has stalled out. And, thanks to my friend Jeff, I even have a name for this recurring pattern.

I’m back in the Velvet Ditch.

What is the Velvet Ditch?

Jeff Wetherhold is a fellow consultant in a different field; we met through Growclass.

We first talked about the Velvet Ditch during a call in February 2023. The holiday festivities were firmly in the rear-view by that point, but we hadn’t caught up in a while.

“How’ve you been?” I ask. “How were your holidays?”

“January was slow,” he tells me. “I didn’t climb out of the Velvet Ditch until the end of the month.”

“Climb out of what?” I ask, instantly fascinated. “Can you tell me more?”

“You know,” he says. “When you’re crawling toward the holidays and you can’t take on another single thing. And then you get there, and you do all the extra work of celebration. And after that, there’s this period where you watch movies or TV or read and relax. It’s like lying in a ditch, but you’re also wrapped in this velvet blanket of creature comforts.”

“I know that feeling,” I tell him, thinking of every December in my adult life and especially my last holiday break. Getting there had been the darkest of crawls. “You mean the unstructured week between Christmas and New Year when time seems to stop.”

“Yeah,” he says. “Only, sometimes, I stay in the ditch way past the holiday. When that happens, I don’t ask very much of myself. I do what’s needed and no more. I let myself recharge. And at some point, I know it’s time to throw off the blanket and stand up.”

I hung up the call filled with the clarity and gratitude that only a talk with a wise friend gives me.

Sadly, awareness isn’t inoculation.

Am I in the Velvet Ditch?

The Urban English Dictionary describes the Velvet Ditch as, “A place that is easy to fall into and hard to crawl out of.”

NO KIDDING.  

Talking with Jeff added his work-specific context—that the Velvet Ditch is both collapse and escape, comfort and holding pattern. That it’s a place of gentleness with your working self, something of an inevitability in the cultural landscape of late-capitalist societies, and not at all limited to the Western holiday periods.

And ditch seasons may also look different, depending on your industry:

• If you’re in accounting, I bet you fall in the ditch right after you finish filing every tax report in existence each spring.
• If you teach, the first month of summer break is probably a big-time Velvet Ditch experience.
• If you’re a work-from-home parent with school-age children, having them come home for THEIR summer break may also be enough to send you tumbling into the ditch.

Depending on your profession, you can probably think of one or two high probability fields in your calendar when the Velvet Ditch looms large.

How I fell in this time

Looking back at last June, I see some obvious ‘straw/camel’s back’ risk factors:

• I lost a dear friend and colleague in 2022. While I had processed a lot of my rawest grief by the time I fell in the ditch, I was not at my most emotionally resilient. (I’m still not.)
• I signed up for a three-week virtual course that month, right after running my first in-person author event on top of the annual end-of-school madness. Until the course started, I’d been deep in a 30,000-word writing sprint on Book II of The Xenthian Cycle and enjoying great momentum. I expected the course to interrupt my streak. I didn’t expect it would derail my writing afterward.
• As a working parent with a home office, I’m on deck when my kids are on summer break. They’re much more autonomous now, but their presences (and camp-related calendars) still shift my working rhythms. A lot, as it happens.
• My consulting practice undergoes a sea change roughly every two years, usually in summer. With hindsight, guess what else often happens during that period?

While my Velvet Ditch stay eventually became obvious, figuring it out took me a good five weeks. After, I felt silly that it took me so long, especially when Jeff had given me the framing concept earlier in the year.

Had a ditch stay in 2023? You weren’t alone

Here’s the kicker.

This fall—as I talked to colleagues, went to conferences, and read other people who are insightful about working life—I realized I wasn’t the only creative wrapped in some version of the Velvet Ditch.

And I don’t think all the factors are personal.

Here’s a short list of energetic drains you may have experienced this year:

• Smelling smoke in your city for days on end or even evacuating from your community while record-breaking forest fires raged through North America.
• Watching your leadership team try to stuff the remote-work genie back into the ‘5 days in-office’ bottle.
• Understanding that we live in a patriarchal society systemically built on white supremacy and colonization, which requires variable energy to manage depending on how this framework interacts with your life, liberty, and goals.
• Continued attacks on the rights of LGBTQ2S people across North America.
• Enduring Covid-19’s long-tail impact on your work, social, and creative life. Many acute disruptions have ended, but we all experienced a mountain of change in four years.
• Caring for an elder or vulnerable relative in an increasingly broken long-term healthcare system.

I’m sure you can list a dozen more factors without breaking a sweat.

So, what’s to be done?

Getting out of the Velvet Ditch: A working guide

I don’t have all the answers for how to escape the Velvet Ditch, and I won’t pretend that I do.

Here are some patterns I’ve noticed:

1. As with grief, there is no timeline. It takes as long as it takes.
2. The lack of timeline likely pisses you off. And the Velvet Ditch does not care. Trying to force your way out may wrap that blanket around you even tighter.
3. Listen to Jeff and let yourself rest. Answer the diversions tugging at your hand. If you suddenly feel like learning the piano, give that a try. Personally, I played a lot of Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey. (Damn, that’s a great game.)
4. Give yourself permission to stop creating for a while. Your drive will come back. I honestly believe that.
5. If you can, take a social media break. Clearing that bandwidth can help a lot, particularly for extremely online people (my brethren, hello).
6. Spend time outdoors with loved ones, pets, and/or small children, depending on how your life is structured. They can be a balm for your soul during a Velvet Ditch stay.

I’m not entirely out of the ditch, even now. I still have days that are less creatively productive.

And yeah, they bother me.

When that happens, I have a little talk with myself about being a human being. I try to gift myself some of the kindness I would give to another.

And I trust that when it’s time to fully stand back up and run again, I’ll know.

EMW Note: Finding yourself in the Velvet Ditch is itself a marker of privilege. I want to acknowledge that.

I wrote this essay weeks before the Hamas attack that left innocent Israeli civilians dead and saw hostages taken. The attack in turn prompted the State of Israel to place over two million people living in Gaza under direct threat of starvation, dehydration, and physical harm as it cut water, electricity and bombed this heavily populated area at an astounding rate.

I am thinking of the Palestinian and Israeli people who have lost or fear for their family, friends, and homes. I’ve written to my representatives asking for an immediate ceasefire and for humanitarian aid to be sent.

If you are grieving for people you care about or in fear for their safety, please know I’m thinking of you with love.

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Since this show involves both work me and writing me, the interview is attributed to my full name. We will pretend it’s E. M. Williams as usual. My pseudonym is more about being intentional regarding which part of my life I’m speaking to than an attempt to conceal my gender or create iron-clad anonymity, but that’s a whole other discussion.

The episode originally aired on August 14 and runs for about 40 minutes. Here’s where you can listen:

• Apple
• Spotify
• Amazon Music

On Learning with Lerner, Lindsey interviews unconventional leaders who have blazed trails in a variety of ways. Her goal is to challenge norms, explore unique journeys, and ignite personal growth for the show’s audience.

Lindsey and I connected on email after I heard Johnathan and Melissa Nightingale on her podcast earlier in the year. I enjoyed Lindsey’s interviewing style so much that pitching my own story was the next logical step.

We ended up having a great conversation about leadership, mentorship, learning how to do hard things by doing them before you feel ready, crowdfunding, launching a consultancy, cracking my own creative productivity code to write Chaos Calling, and why I don’t think you have to suffer to make art.

Who is this conversation for?

Anyone pursuing an unconventional path who wants to hear more from people with similar ambitions in adjacent fields.

Topics we covered on the Learning with Lerner Podcast

• 1:55 — Living in Toronto and a bit about my family history, along with my childhood desire to write
• 3:00 — Integrating creativity without bankrupting your existence; the myth of artistic suffering; Big Magic
• 9:50 — How I cracked the secret to figuring out my creative productivity process; the ‘Don’t Stop Believing’ story; Chaos Calling’s origins in movement and Wattpad
• 16:40 — Being a woman in a field dominated by men; working in tech and academia; how those experiences informed Dave Montcalm’s and Jason Lin’s storylines; using commuting and consulting to make art
• 24:00 — What my typical day looks like now
• 25:20 — Changes in technology and research across my working life
• 26:50 — Mentorship’s role in my career and why I believe in giving back; working with Growclass
• 28:00 — How crowdfunding helped me develop the skills to launch a self-published book
• 32:00 — I pitch Chaos Calling to Lindsey’s listeners
• 33:35 — My career advice on how to go rogue and work for yourself
• 35:45 — Telling people what you do when you have multiple career pursuits; being comfortable with self promotion
• 37:00 — Best and worst career advice I ever got; inspiration is super weird

For more, you can follow Lindsey and the Learning with Lerner podcast:

• Instagram: @lindseylerner
• LinkedIn: Lindsey Lerner

The post I’m on Learning with Lerner! appeared first on E.M. Williams - Fantasy Author.

I originally wrote this post on Medium in 2015. I remember being excited that some ‘important’ Twitter accounts engaged with it. I’ve left the references to the manuscript that would eventually become Chaos Calling as-is.

Once upon a time, I wrote a post assessing the pros and cons of the Wattpad platform for aspiring writers on my blog [2026 me: I’m referring to The Analytic Eye, which is now offline]. I wrote 3,000 words and took a fence-sitting position on its value.

Instead of getting into the thing to really understand what it could do, I responded like a critic. All these months later with with 100,000 words of a novel draft in hand thanks in large part to the existence of Wattpad, I’m struck by how wrong I was.

What changed?

Talking to an Angel

The first thing that helped open my eyes to Wattpad’s platform was a discussion with one of the company’s early angel investors.

I know him through my work in Toronto’s startup land; I expressed curiosity in his Wattpad involvement one afternoon and he told me about his decision to invest. During that discussion, I posed my analytical concerns about the platform, which essentially boiled down to this:

Why do the Wattpaders who generate content make nothing when the platform is valued in the millions? Doesn’t that devalue content, writing and writers?

“I didn’t really consider that,” he said [I’m paraphrasing because I didn’t make detailed notes]. “Wattpad’s power is that they’ve built something extraordinary for the Internet: a respectful, friendly community that welcomes writers and lets them thrive. A lot of them are young women. They go on there and find an audience for their work. Maybe they get better. They might do it for fun. Or, they could make friends and connect with others like them all over the world. But that community is what I thought was exceptional.”

This conversation, which took place in late September 2014, coincided with five or six other events that I now realize were pivotal in reigniting my creative writing life.

“Hmm,” I remember thinking. “All I did when I was researching that blog post was upload some existing content to Wattpad that I had already written. I didn’t try composing on it.

“Maybe Wattpad could work for me, too.”

And so when inspiration coalesced in my brain barely 72 hours after that conversation, I decided to give writing on the platform a serious shot.

On Passions, Day Jobs and Parenting

Like most adults in North America, my day-to-day life is demanding. I’m married and we have two fantastic kids in grade school. I have an intense career, love my family and wish I saw my friends more. My chore list is a perpetual motion machine. I’m disciplined about my gym membership.

But I’ve written since I was a child. It’s how I make sense of the world and the activity that most consistently allows me to experience flow.

Yet after our kids were born, my writing life died.

During an interview I did with Guy Gavriel Kay while working at the University of Toronto in my late 20s, he surmised I was an aspiring writer and kindly asked me about my ambitions. He warned me that writing while parenting is tricky, particularly for women. And he suggested, wisely, that I get a manuscript done before I reproduced.

Didn’t happen.

After my first child arrived, my writing slowed to a trickle. I stopped submitting work to my writing group. I also gained some perspective and shelved my research-heavy, ambitious, alternate-history/fantasy novel that I’d been trying to complete for the better part of a decade.

As Elizabeth Gilbert aptly describes in her recent book, Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear, I’d taken too long to develop that idea and its fiery core was stone dead.

I no longer had endless evening and weekend hours to reanimate that dream or catch a new one. So I thought I’d missed my shot.

And here’s the thing:

However rewarding it is to be a parent (and it is), it’s devastating to feel your creative dream has died.

Thinking about writing during that time was like touching an empty tooth socket with my tongue. I knew what was supposed to be there, but was surprised and disappointed and sad when it wasn’t.

Enter Wattpad: 100,000 Words in 13 Months

Thirteen months after opening myself to the idea of using Wattpad as a mobile composition tool, I’ve written an entirely new novel.

I hit 100,000 words last week.

[2026 me: I finished the first draft of what was The Xenthian Cycle in full about six weeks after writing this post, completely unaware it was a series and not a standalone novel. Oh, 2015 me, you have no idea what you’ve done.]

I haven’t published as I went like many Wattpaders do, though I was tempted. While writing and work-shopping that earlier novel draft, I learned that feedback while writing derails my ability to finish. I’m more productive in a vacuum.

If you’re a numbers person, my fictional output over the last six years averages between 3,000 and 5,000 words a year (my day job also involves writing). Using Wattpad increased my productivity by a factor of 20.

By any measure, that’s a blistering shift. How’s it possible?

With Wattpad’s iOS app, I discovered I love writing on my phone while standing on the subway.

I sometimes edit with the desktop interface, but the bulk of my draft was composed by phone in the doors of TTC subway cars during my daily round-trip commute. I put my earphones on, find a spot and make out with my imagination for 25 minutes each way.

Did I know writing on the subway was possible?

Before you ask, I remember reading articles like this 2010 Telegraph story about Peter Brett writing a novel on his phone and thinking, “Yeah, right.” I’m skeptical I could have written a book this way before contemporary smartphones. Bigger mobile screen sizes coupled with better digital keyboards and the solid Wattpad interface made it feasible.

Writing with Wattpad means I don’t have to worry about how crowded the car is or about getting a seat. I’m right handed, so when I was trying to write in a paper notebook I had to have a left-sided seat on the end of a row. Ask anyone from Toronto who takes transit and they’ll tell you that’s next to impossible during peak travel times.

I also didn’t have to shoehorn writing into the time I need to work or see my family, exercise, sleep or whatever, though I’ll sometimes take my phone out and keep writing after my kids have gone to bed.

Before this change, I thought of myself as someone with no time. Wattpad found me slack I didn’t know I had, provided I was willing to upend my old writing process, Lewis Carroll-styles.

Better still, I didn’t have to quit my job, ignore my family, move to Tibet, plow through my savings or disown my social commitments to gain this freedom.

What it all means for my creativity

While it’s early to say if the novel will resonate with others, my days of siting at a desk and staring blankly at the blinking cursor on the barren white space of an empty Word document are over. Writing on my phone with Wattpad feels like play.

I don’t feel anxious about beginning a new chapter or finding the next word or scene. I just open the app and trust that flow is waiting for me.

And, like self-fulfilling magic, it usually is.

So believe me when I say Wattpad has completely changed the way I write fiction. I don’t have words for how much joy this change has brought back into my day-to-day life.

What about my earlier criticism? What if I never make a dime from the book?

It doesn’t really matter (though of course I’d be open to it).

Using Wattpad brought back my creative satisfaction. The joys of this past year have been just that: a string of pearl-like delights for me alone.

So thanks, Wattpad, for facilitating this experience (with bonus mad props to the Zen Desk support team).

Here’s to the last five chapters.

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